Billy the Kid Read online

  “I told Kid that they were looking for him,” Frank remembered. “He said he knew it, but he was tired of dodging and had run from them about long enough.”30

  In truth, Billy Bonney had scarcely begun his career of dodging. With both federal and territorial murder charges hanging over him, he had no choice but to continue dodging unless Governor Wallace came to his aid. That seemed increasingly unlikely. Wallace had failed to deflect District Attorney Rynerson’s relentless pursuit at the April term of territorial court and apparently had done nothing to interfere with the effort to bring Billy before the federal court in June. Billy could conclude only that the governor had forsaken him.

  As Billy later explained his reasoning, “I went up to Lincoln to stand my trial on the warrant that was out for me, but the territory took a change of venue to Doña Ana, and I knew that I had no show, and so I skinned out.”31

  12

  The Rustler

  As he had done more than once in the past, when Billy Bonney “skinned out” of Lincoln, he headed for Fort Sumner.

  For Billy, the old fort turned frontier town held many attractions. The most important, in the closing months of 1879, was an almost total absence of law. Fort Sumner lay along the southern margin of San Miguel County, one hundred miles from the county seat at Las Vegas. The sheriff and his deputies had more than they could handle in that booming railroad town. They did not often get to Anton Chico or Puerto de Luna, much less to distant Fort Sumner. Billy did not need to worry that a lawman with a posse of soldiers and a handful of arrest warrants would disturb his sleep.

  Another attraction was a wide circle of friends—or, increasingly, men who professed friendship rather than give offense. The Hispanic sheepherders who drifted with their flocks across the grassy plains were authentic friends. At the sheep camps Billy could always count on hospitality and any help he needed in evading the law. The Anglo cattlemen would help too, though less genuinely and more in apprehension than true fellowship.

  And here, in addition, Billy counted at least one old comrade from the Lincoln County War. Doc Scurlock had gone to Texas, but Charley Bowdre remained. He worked for wages for Thomas G. Yerby, a respected stockman who had bought Lucien Maxwell’s blooded cattle and established a ranch at Las Cañaditas, twenty miles northeast of Sumner. Besides Charley, Billy could, as always, count on “Red Tom” O’Folliard, the strapping youth who had clung to him like a shadow ever since the breakout from the McSween house.

  Fort Sumner boasted a lively social scene that appealed to Billy. The saloons of Beaver Smith and Bob Hargrove rocked with hilarity as cowboys, sheepmen, and outlaws congregated to carouse and gamble. Billy passed many hours dealing monte, especially in Smith’s place. Beaver Smith operated the town’s most popular drinking hole. A former chuck wrangler for John Chisum, Smith’s chief distinction was the Chisum brand, unwillingly acquired when he chose the wrong side in a cowboy strike. As an acquaintance explained it, “the boys got drunk one day and branded him—put a rail on his side and jinglebobbed his damned ears.”1

  A powerful appeal, as Billy well remembered from his sojourn at Fort Sumner in the fall of 1878, lay in the frequent and spirited bailes. As Pete Maxwell’s sister Paulita reminisced,

  Fort Sumner was a gay little place. The weekly dance was an event, and pretty girls from Santa Rosa, Puerto de Luna, Anton Chico, and from towns and ranches fifty miles away drove in to attend it. Billy the Kid cut quite a gallant figure at these affairs. He was not handsome but he had a certain sort of boyish good looks. He was always smiling and good-natured and very polite and danced remarkably well, and the little Mexican beauties made eyes at him from behind their fans and used all their coquetries to capture him and were very vain of his attentions.2

  “Billy the Kid,” Paulita continued, “fascinated many women.” “In every placeta in the Pecos some little señorita was proud to be known as his querida.” Although she later denied it, Paulita herself was one of the queridas. Another was Celsa Gutierrez, whose sister was married to a tall, lanky, former buffalo hunter named Pat Garrett. A third, Abrana García, bore Billy two daughters, who later succumbed to diphtheria. Gossip also connected him to Nasaria Yerby and Charley Bowdre’s wife, Manuela. Nasaria was Tom Yerby’s eighteen-year-old “housekeeper,” whose year-old daughter was commonly believed to have been fathered by Billy.3

  Billy’s intentions as he took up residence in Fort Sumner are obscure. Disillusioned with the system of justice, he may have decided to get back at his persecutors by turning to open outlawry. More likely, since he did not give up his efforts to have the charges against him set aside, he simply drifted ambivalently into a life of more and more frequent crime.

  Fort Sumner and vicinity, 1880–81

  In 1880 Fort Sumner afforded an ideal incubator for crime. Criminals abounded, drawn into New Mexico by the Santa Fe Railroad, driven into New Mexico by the Texas Rangers. Perhaps fifty or sixty hard cases descended on Fort Sumner, strategically situated on the western edge of a burgeoning cattle empire and under almost no risk from law officers. Consorting with these men in Beaver Smith’s saloon, Billy Bonney, Charley Bowdre, and Tom O’Folliard easily fell in with their schemes.

  Billy’s travels in the Texas Panhandle in the autumn of 1878 had provided him with a glimpse of the possibilities. The big ranches—the LIT, the LX, and others—lay along the northern edge of the Staked Plains, a vast table of grass stretching south from the Canadian River for almost three hundred miles and on the west shouldering into New Mexico to the borders of the Pecos Valley. In winter, fierce “northers,” checked by barely a single tree, drove the scattered herds south across this level plateau. Enterprising New Mexican rustlers had only to ride up the western scarp of the cap-rock, round up drifting strays, and drive them off the range before the cowboys from the north could complete their spring sweep.4

  An ideal place to assemble and hide drifted cattle was Los Portales, a hollow in the plains about seventy miles southeast of Fort Sumner where a spring issued from a rough rock formation. The rocks reminded Hispanics of porches, hence “Portales.” Here, outlaws hid their booty. Here, as Billy later admitted, he and Charley Bowdre had a “ranch.”

  Markets for Panhandle beef lay to the west, in Billy’s old retreats amid the mountains of Lincoln County. One was the U.S. government at Fort Stanton and the Mescalero Apache Indian Agency, reached indirectly through a middleman based on the far side of the Sierra Blanca. Here Pat Coghlan reigned as the “King of Tularosa.” A six-foot, ruddy-faced Irishman, powerfully built and athletic despite his nearly sixty years, Pat had settled at Tularosa in 1874, opened a saloon and hotel, and built up an extensive ranching enterprise. Acquiring rustled cows for twelve dollars a head and selling them to government contractors for twice that, Coghlan earned substantial profits. “Coghlan was stealing every way he could,” recalled one of his cowpunchers. “He was a pretty hard old thief.”5

  A second market was the booming new mining town of White Oaks. Sprawling across a narrow, mountain-girt valley forty-five miles by wagon road northwest of Lincoln, White Oaks had blossomed almost overnight after gold was discovered there in 1879. Increasingly, White Oaks rather than Lincoln became Billy’s home away from Fort Sumner. The town’s ten saloons vibrated with life, the gaming tables stoked his fondness for monte, and a ready market existed for almost anything one had to sell, including illicit beef.

  “I wasn’t the leader of any gang,” Billy later told reporters.6 Contrary to legend, he probably spoke the truth. The outlaw temperament did not lend itself to the discipline and structure of an organization commanded by a single chief. Rather, impromptu gangs formed for particular operations, then dissolved and reformed in differing strength and composition.

  Of the names generally assigned to Billy’s “gang” in 1880, only O’Folliard and Bowdre recur consistently. Three other men frequently worked with Billy, Tom, and Charley: David Rudabaugh, Thomas Pickett, and William Wilson. That they also ran with men not associated w
ith Billy and engaged in exploits of which he was not a part indicates that they were not members of an organized gang headed by the Kid. When they came together for particular undertakings, Billy’s quick mind and forceful personality probably gave him a controlling influence. But the older and fiercely independent Rudabaugh, for one, would not have tolerated any hint of command.

  Dave Rudabaugh was a stocky man about forty years of age, with long brown hair curling at the tips, a square-jawed face, a big mustache and, in the field, a shaggy beard. He had rustled cattle in Texas, held up trains in Kansas, and robbed stagecoaches in New Mexico. With others of the “Dodge City gang,” he had plagued Las Vegas for six months with theft and confidence games while City Marshal John J. Webb gave covert support. In return, when Webb found himself in jail convicted of murder, Rudabaugh tried to break him out. A shootout erupted, and Dave or his accomplice gunned down the jailer. The killing of a Hispanic lawman by an Anglo outlaw so enraged the Hispanic population of Las Vegas that Rudabaugh fled down the Pecos to Fort Sumner, where in the late spring of 1880 he cast his lot with the other rustlers who hung out at Beaver Smith’s saloon. For unadulterated evil, Rudabaugh far outshone Billy.7

  Another who fell in with Billy was Tom Pickett, the black sheep of a prominent Texas family, who had followed Rudabaugh from Kansas to New Mexico. Roughly Billy’s age, the erect, powerfully built youth had served briefly as a Texas Ranger, then made himself so unpopular as a Las Vegas policeman that he had to flee because, as a local editor later recalled, “a ‘job’ was put up to kill him.” Like Rudabaugh, he found his way into the Fort Sumner area, where Charley Bowdre hired him to help on the Yerby ranch. When Bowdre rode with the Kid, so did Pickett.8

  A third who became closely identified with the Kid during 1880 was Billy Wilson. An Ohioan, he reached Fort Sumner by way of Dodge City, White Oaks, and Lincoln. He was two years younger than the other Billy, was stouter, and had a light complexion, sandy hair, and a serious disposition.9

  Although Billy ramrodded no formally organized gang, as the months of 1880 passed he grew more and more prominent in the outlaw circles of Fort Sumner, and the people of White Oaks and Lincoln came to regard him as a leader in the rustling fraternity. Several events spotlighted his name.

  One was the second killing with which the Kid can be solely and incontestably credited.10

  This feat grew out of the reappearance in the Pecos Valley of the Chisum herds, which had been moved to the Texas Panhandle in the autumn of 1878 to escape the ravages of the Lincoln County War. At that time the cows belonged to Hunter, Evans and Company, with John Chisum simply acting as manager. Subsequently, the firm sold them back into Chisum ownership—not to Old John but to his brothers James and Pitzer. Back on the Pecos, the Chisum stock suffered repeated depredations during the last months of 1879. Justly or not, much of the suspicion fell on Billy Bonney.

  On January 10, 1880, Jim Chisum and three hands, herding a small bunch of cows, camped near Fort Sumner. The stock, rounded up in a canyon to the north, bore crudely altered Chisum brands and so represented recovered stolen property. With two companions, Billy Bonney rode out to the camp and asked to inspect the brands. Chisum, who suspected Billy himself of the brand artistry, agreed.

  Afterward, Billy said to Chisum, “Bring your boys down to the fort, it’s my treat.”

  At Bob Hargrove’s saloon in Fort Sumner, a Texas braggart and bully named Joe Grant was already obnoxiously drunk. Earlier he had accosted Billy Bonney with the challenge, “I’ll bet $25 that I kill a man today before you do.” Now he staggered over to Jack Finan, one of the Chisum hands, admired the ivory-handled revolver in Finan’s holster, pulled it out, and replaced it with his own. Rather than antagonize the drunk, Jack said nothing.

  Billy drifted over to Grant, looked at Finan’s pistol, and observed, “That’s a mighty nice looking six-shooter you got.” Casually lifting it out of Grant’s holster, Billy examined it admiringly and deftly spun the cylinder. Earlier, Finan had fired several shots at a mark, leaving three of the chambers loaded with empty shell cases. When Billy handed the pistol back to Grant, the cylinder was positioned so that the hammer would fall on one of these cases rather than a loaded round.

  Grant grew louder and more menacing, smashing bottles on the back bar and vowing to shoot someone. Eyeing Jim Chisum, he proclaimed his intention of killing John Chisum.

  “Hold on,” said Billy, “you got the wrong sow by the ear.” This was John’s brother Jim, he pointed out.

  “That’s a lie,” shouted Grant.

  Billy turned and walked toward the door. As Jim’s son Will described it, “Grant squared off at Billy, who when he heard the click whirled around and ‘bang, bang, bang.’ Right in the chin—could cover all of them with a half a dollar.”

  “Joe,” observed Billy, “I’ve been there too often for you.”

  The shooting of Joe Grant earned Billy some notoriety, but like the dispatch of Windy Cahill, it had enough extenuating circumstances to prompt little concern in the Fort Sumner area. Had Billy perpetrated a cold-blooded murder, public opinion would have been aroused and the sheriff of San Miguel County moved to investigate. That the newspapers gave the event virtually no notice, and that the law never acted, stamp it as simply another saloon dispute that ended fatally.11

  Billy’s own view of the affair was summed up in a flippant remark to Postmaster Milnor Rudulph of Sunnyside, near Fort Sumner. Asked what lay behind the shooting, Billy replied, “Oh, nothing; it was a game of two and I got there first.” Commented a witness, “The daring young rascal seemed to enjoy the telling as well as the killing.”12

  Another source of Billy’s prominence was John Chisum. Somehow, the youth conceived the notion that Chisum owed him wages for fighting McSween’s battles in the Lincoln County War. If Billy truly thought that, he had concocted a self-serving rationalization for his criminal activities. Chisum lent no more than his name and sympathy to the McSween cause and in fact had been absent from the territory during much of the war. Certainly he never intimated that he would bankroll any of the McSween warriors.

  Nonetheless, Billy indignantly voiced his claim whenever he had the chance. Once, indeed, in the spring of 1880, he accosted Chisum personally at Fort Sumner.

  As Will Chisum heard it from his father, Old John replied, “Billy, you know as well as I do that I never hired you to fight in the Lincoln County War. I always pay my honest debts. I don’t owe you anything, and you can kill me but you won’t knock me out of many years. I’m an old man now.”

  Billy hesitated a moment, then replied, “Aw, you ain’t worth killing.”13

  According to popular belief, Billy vowed to get his due by plundering the Chisum herds. If so, like Joe Grant, Billy had “the wrong sow by the ear.” By 1880 the only Chisum cows in the Pecos Valley belonged to Jim and Pitzer Chisum. Billy made one known foray against their stock, according to charges they filed in district court in Las Vegas. On March 10, 1880, he made off with ten steers, ten bullocks, and two cows with a total value of $220—scarcely a crippling loss.14

  Yet even at the time, both Billy and Chisum perpetuated the notion of a deadly feud, and it gradually became part of the public perception. For at least some of his rising fame, therefore, the Kid could credit John Chisum himself.

  As a third basis of growing distinction, Billy found himself singled out as a supplier of stolen beef to Pat Coghlan. In May 1880, with Charley Bowdre and Tom O’Folliard, Billy assembled nearly sixty head of Panhandle beef at Los Portales, then drove them west to the neighborhood of White Oaks and sold them to Tom Cooper, a middleman acting for Pat Coghlan. This yielded Billy and his comrades a little more than seven hundred dollars for their labors, hardly a big take, and returned Coghlan one hundred percent on his investment.15

  At this same time, plagued by rustlers, the Texas victims banded together and formed the Panhandle Stock Association. In autumn the association hired a detective, Frank Stewart, and sent him with four cowboys on a sco
ut into New Mexico. At White Oaks, draped over a corral fence, Stewart’s group found hides with the LIT brand, and from residents they picked up accusations that threw the blame on Billy Bonney. Acting on Stewart’s report, the Texas ranchers decided to send an expedition to New Mexico to recover their cattle and, if possible, put an end to the rustling career of the Kid.16

  Not only the Panhandle stockmen had Billy in their sights. Early in September 1880 complaints reached the U.S. Treasury Department that counterfeit bank notes were being passed in Lincoln and White Oaks. Suspicion fell on two of Billy’s sometime confederates, Tom Cooper and Billy Wilson. The U.S. Secret Service sent a “special operative,” Azariah F. Wild, to investigate. Basing himself in Lincoln early in October, Wild launched a probe that linked the counterfeiters to the Fort Sumner rustlers and that shed occasional light on the doings of Billy Bonney.17

  Wild’s inquiries seemed to point to the livery stable of W. H. West and Sam Diedrick in White Oaks as a center of dealings in both illicit money and illicit beef. Another gathering place for the malefactors was Beaver Smith’s saloon in Fort Sumner. Still another was the ranch of Sam Diedrick’s brother Dan at Bosque Grande, Chisum’s old headquarters on the Pecos twenty-eight miles north of Roswell. Wild thought not only Wilson and Cooper guilty of passing the bogus money, but other rustlers as well, including the Kid.

  The state of justice in Lincoln County, and indeed in all New Mexico, appalled Operative Wild. In Lincoln the citizens stood in such dread of the outlaws that they would not testify in the courts, even though they knew the guilty parties and what they had done. Only a few would help Wild, and then only in the deepest secrecy. He could not trust Sheriff George Kimball, who was friendly with the culprits and often played cards with “Billy Kid.” Nor could Wild get the cooperation he thought his due from the U.S. marshal for New Mexico, John Sherman, and the U.S. attorney, Sidney M. Barnes. Because of their lack of energy, he concluded, men such as the Kid, although wanted on federal charges, could range with impunity from Fort Sumner to Lincoln, committing fresh crimes and terrorizing the citizens.